Stress Test Quotes

“you cannot enjoy the light without enduring the heat.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“you can’t judge a decision by how it turns out, only by whether it made sense given the information available at the time.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“Financial stability cannot depend on omniscient supervisors identifying and preemptively defusing any potential source of crisis; it requires safeguards that can help the system withstand the force of a severe storm, and tools the government can use to limit the damage.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“Plan beats no plan. Bad options are better than no options”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“The rating agencies were not exceedingly competent”
― Timothy Geithner, STRESS TEST

“We should require substantial down payments for borrowers, which would make it harder for some families to become homeowners but would help reduce the risk of the terrible collapses we saw in this crisis. Higher down payment requirements would help serve as shock absorbers for the system—much like capital requirements for financial firms or margin requirements for derivatives investors—limiting the risk of excessive booms by limiting highly leveraged borrowing.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“I also didn’t like the idea of writing in the first person about a set of decisions that so many others were involved with.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“I valued and relied on his counsel, even when it was most uncomfortable.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“worked together with a degree of mutual respect and confidence in one another that is exceptionally rare in Washington”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“And despite my efforts to escape, I am glad he compelled me to stay for his full first term.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“As bad as it was, it was better than it could have been, much better than the pattern of history.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“but these myths served to undermine people’s faith in my motives and intentions and cast a shadow over everything we did.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“And I wish I had done a better job of explaining our strategy, so that more Americans would have understood that we were working on their behalf, and wouldn’t have lost so much faith in their government.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“It was deeply discouraging to watch so many Republicans refuse to back President Bush on TARP”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“we kept following through on our commitments, and the markets began to believe.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“The stress test worked in part because these efforts began to get traction.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“None of those instruments will be powerful enough alone, and weakness in any of them will undermine the effectiveness of the others.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“The goal is to let the system start to adjust and deleverage without tipping into panic and collapse, which sounds a lot easier in theory than it is in practice.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“It can also wipe out the weakest firms and the riskiest financing mechanisms, laying the groundwork for a restructuring”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“you risk letting a panic gain too much momentum. Once you fall behind the curve of a crisis, it can be hard to catch up.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“Frank, but we would have put out the fire a lot faster if we had had all those tools from the start, and that would have limited the damage suffered by millions of Americans.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“we didn’t foresee how a nationwide decline in home prices could induce panic in the financial system sufficient to drag down the broader economy.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“forcing them to imagine the unimaginable and maintain enough capital to survive it.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“With the knowledge we have today, it’s clear we didn’t do enough.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“Financial regulation will never keep up with financial innovation, but regulators should regard it as a constant challenge, and keep at it.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“Higher down-payment requirements for homeowners provide a cushion in case of job losses, medical emergencies, or housing downturns,”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“I felt envious of the clarity of his argument, whatever the quality of the legal reasoning.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“We didn’t do a good job of communicating the gray, either. That’s partly because I wasn’t a natural communicator.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“Life is about alternatives. I’d choose pain now over pain later.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“wouldn’t engage, except to say that all the Bush tax cuts should be extended, and that our proposals were “job killing.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises